Reply to Please explain how Henry parent position on CC makes sense

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]Can someone help me make sense of their position. If you look at the 10 year projections, the school that will bear the disproportionate burden of the overcrowding in the next 10 years is Wakefield. This position of “if you don’t build us a full high school at the cost of $250 million, then build nothing” seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Wakefield will be 1000 students over capacity. The students least likely to be able to opt out for private school. This whole campaign seems ill-advised to me.
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At the time the discussion began the options were:

1. overcrowded Wakefield,

2. terrible traffic in your neighborhood, no parking on your streets ever again, and eventually being forced to send your kid to a crap school with no amenities when no one else choices into the crap school with no amenities (and the writing was already on the wall regarding Arlington Tech at this point)

3. Neighborhood school (so alleviate parking and traffic issues) with equal opportunities for your kids -  what would you advocate for?  Be honest?  There is only one right answer there.

Now it appears the options are:

1. overcrowded Wakefield,

3. Neighborhood school with no parking (so no parking on your streets every again) and your kids sits in a refurbished elementary school and may not even have the option of taking any arts electives in high school (band, choir, theatre and art require specialty rooms that may not be built), may not get to be on a sports team, be in a band or in the school play, and your kid loses instruction time sitting on a bus to go for a mandatory swim at Long Branch. And the program's unproven so you don't even know if your kids will have a fair shot at good colleges, not that they would have been competitive with their complete lack of extracurriculars anyway.

Again. What would you choose?  Again there is only one right answer. Every move the neighborhood made was rational given the options available at the time.

So here's the thing about successful choice schools - you have to know the focus of the school, then design the space around it. By saying that they were just going to slap a story on top of a dilapidated building to build some generic classrooms and then figure out a choice specialty later APS tipped their hand that it was never really gonna be a choice school. Cause a performing arts choice school requires very specific room set-ups. And they weren't talking about building theaters and rehearsal rooms.  A really good STEM school requires science labs and robotics labs. They weren't talking about building those either. APS signaled in the very beginning that they were going to try to build the cheapest most undesirable thing they could get away with so the neighborhood fought for what they could get. You'd do the same[/quote]

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